The Browne Report, Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education
(2010), is quite right. Students (and their parents) are much closer to the
job market than universities. They are going to be much more realistic
about what subjects should be taught. The majority of young people only
want to go to university to pick up a piece of paper at the end that will
impress a potential employer. However, this doesn't mean that all
universities will want to become facsimiles of the broad job market. If
only in part, some specialize and establish a reputation in recondite
subjects which attracts a minority of young people with a genuine love of
learning for its own sake.
KSH
(At 20:57 14/12/2010 -0500, you wrote:
December 13, 2010, 6:00 pm
Here we are. Utility again. Been here before. It was before the 98
million were murdered only to be repeated in the 20th century. How many now?
Their hearts are dead. They have been devoured by the ants.
Nezahaulcoytl
REH
The Value of Higher Education Made Literal
By <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/stanley-fish/>STANLEY FISH
A few weeks ago at a conference, I listened to a distinguished political
philosopher tell those in attendance that he would not be speaking before
them had he not been the beneficiary, as a working-class youth in England,
of a government policy to provide a free university education to the
children of British citizens. He walked into the university with little
knowledge of the great texts that inform modern democracy and he walked
out an expert in those very same texts.
It goes without saying that he did not know what he was doing at the
outset; he did not, that is, think to himself, I would like to be come a
scholar of Locke, Hobbes and Mill. But thats what he became, not by choice
(at least in the beginning) but by opportunity.
That opportunity to stroll into a world from which he might otherwise have
been barred by class and a lack of funds is not likely to be extended to
young men and women in England today, especially if the recommendations of
the Browne report,
<http://hereview.independent.gov.uk/hereview/report/>Securing a
Sustainable Future for Higher Education(Oct. 12, 2010), are implemented by
a government that seemed to welcome them and, some suspect, mandated them.
The rhetoric of the report is superficially benign; its key phrase is
student choice: Our proposals put students at the heart of the system.Our
recommendations . . . are based on giving students the ability to make an
informed choice of where and what to study.Students are best placed to
make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher
education.
The obvious objection to this last declaration is, No, they arent;
judgment is what education is supposed to produce; if students possessed
it at the get-go, there would be nothing for courses and programs to
do.But that objection would be entirely beside the point in the context of
the assumption informing the report, the assumption that what students
want to get from participating in higher education is money. Under the
system the report proposes, government support of higher education in the
form of block grants to universities (which are free to allocate funds as
they see fit) would be replaced by monies given directly to matriculating
students, who would then vote with their pocketbooks by choosing which
courses to investin.
Investis the right word because the cost of courses will be indexed to the
likelihood of financial rewards down the line. A courses key selling
pointwill be that it provides improved employabilityand students will be
asked to pay higher chargesfor a course only if there is a proven path to
higher earnings.(There is a verbal echo here, surely unintended, of the
value nowhere to be found in the report, the value of higher learning.)
The result, anticipated and welcomed by the reports authors, will be that
courses of study that deliver improved employability will prosper,while
those that dont will disappear.This will hold also for universities, which
will either prosper or wither on the vine depending on the agility they
display in adapting themselves to student-consumer demands. Institutions
will have to persuade students that the charges they put on their courses
represents [sic] value for money.(Adapt or die.)
It hardly need be said that under this scheme the arts and the humanities
(and most of the social sciences) will be the losers: the model of
rational economic (as opposed to educational) choice does not encourage
investment in medieval allegory or modern poetry or Greek history.
But the Browne report is taking no chances. Concerned that students might
choose (invest) poorly and thereby threaten the viability of
prioritycourses of study science, technology, clinical medicine and
nursing the report proposes additional and targeted investment for those
courses.
The confidence in consumer choice as a means of identifying value will be
supplemented (one might say weakened) by a state subsidy that will ensure
that the proper values technological and scientific are nourished and make
it even more likely that other values, associated with art, literature,
philosophy, history, anthropology, political science, etc., are not. In
addition, strict surveillance will be required to make sure that
universities accepting these targeted investmentfunds actually use them
for priority courses and dont divert them to frills.
Students will not only be the drivers of the new system; they will pay for
it, but only after they enjoy the income they have been promised: Students
should only pay towards the cost of their education once they are enjoying
the benefits of that education.
The logic is the logic of privatization. Higher education is no longer
conceived of as a public good as a good the effects of which permeate
society but is rather a private benefit, and as such it should be
supported by those who enjoy the benefit. It is reasonable to ask those
who gain private benefits from higher education to help fund it rather
than rely . . . on public funds collected through taxation from people who
have not participated in higher education themselves.No one who has not
been to a university has any stake in the health or survival of the system.
At the end of the report, the authors congratulate themselves: We have
never lost sight of the value of learning to students, nor the significant
contribution of higher education to the quality of life in a civilized
society.A first response to this declaration might be to describe it as
either a lie or a joke. There is no recognition in the report at all of
the value of learning; quality is a measure nowhere referenced;
civilization, as far as one can see, will have to take care of itself .
But at second thought this paean of self-praise is merited once we
remember that that the reports relentless monetization of everything in
sight has redefined its every word: value now means return on the dollar;
quality of life now means the number of cars or houses you can buy; a
civilized society is a society where the material goods a society offers
can be enjoyed by more people.
One must admit that this view of value and the good life has a definite
appeal. It will resonate with many not only in England but here in the
United States. And to the extent it does, the privatization of higher
education will advance apace and the days when a working-class Brit or (in
my case) an immigrants son can wander into the groves of academe and
emerge a political theorist or a Miltonist will recede into history and
legend.
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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